Bubble Bibble

Let me get one thing clear: I don't fully grasp the rules of Oh Hi! Octopi. The game is not what you might call self-explanatory, and the breezy tutorial isn't exactly enlightening, either.

When playing this game, I'm often left staring at my iPod, feeling confused, and bewildered, like a Neolithic caveman who's just found, well, an iPod.

Here's how it works, as far as I can tell. An unlimited stream of coloured octopi pop out of a window in the centre of the screen. They slowly march through the level, but you can momentarily stun and shove them with a whack of your mallet.

There's a big button at the top of the screen, and if you slug it with your hammer a coloured paintball appears. Knock this into an octopus of the same colour and the cephalopod will kick the bucket and fall off the screen.

Easy as octo-pie

Here's the kicker: as it drops down the screen, it takes out any same-coloured octopi in its path - and you score a big fat bonus.

That's your strategy, then. Setting up these complicated chain reaction situations where one felled yellow octopus will take out a procession of other yellow squid-things beneath it.

That's easier said than done, of course. It's extremely difficult to manually move an octopus. The creatures move at a truly glacial pace, the paintballs are unpredictable bouncy balls, and the octopi never quite fall in the way you want them to.

Setting up a decent chain reaction in Oh Hi! Octopi! is a slow and thankless task, and with all the moving parts and unpredictable variables it feels like setting up a row of toppling dominoes on the wing of a moving Airbus.

Oh bye! Octopi!

It's a tedious game, and one that belies the cutesy visuals and the single-screen arcade-style level layout, which looks like Bubble Bobble or Super Crate Box. While we're here, its also worth mentioning that the two-button controls are too basic for their own good, and the horrid music quite literally gave me a headache.

I probably don't fully grasp the intricacies of Oh Hi! Octopi! You probably won't, either. In a different game, this obliqueness might have translated into depth and complexity, but Oh Hi! Octopi! sadlygets too much wrong for its obliqueness to be anything other than an added irritation.